Here are results for Shard-Query 2.0 Beta 1* on the Star Schema Benchmark at scale factor
10. In the comparison below the “single threaded” response
times for InnoDB are the response times reported in
my previous test which did not use
Shard-Query.

Shard-Query configuration

Shard-Query has been configured to use a single host. The
Shard-Query configuration repository is stored on the host.
Gearman is also running on the host, as are
the Gearman workers. In short, only one host is involved in
the testing.

I find myself flying to New York on Monday for some dealnews related
business. Anytime I travel I try and find something fun to do at
night. (Watching a movie by myself in Provo, Utah was kinda not
that fun.) So, this week I asked on Twitter if anything was
happening while I would be in town. Anything would do. A meetup
of PHP/MySQL users or some design/css/js related stuff for
example. Pretty much anything interesting. Well, later that day I
received an IM from the brilliant John Allspaw,
Senior VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. He wanted me to
swing by the Etsy offices and say hi. Turns out it is only a
block away from where I would be. Awesome! He also mentioned that
he would like to have me come and speak at their offices some
time. That would be neat too. I will have to plan better …

I use Gearman entirely as a point to introduce asynchronous-ness
in my application. There is a complicated and image-heavy PDF to
generate and this happens on an automated schedule. To do this, I
use the GearmanClient::doBackground method. This inserts a
priority 1 job into my queue. …

I'm using gearman for the first time in a new project, and two
things in particular were bothering me. Firstly, there doesn't
seem to be a built-in way to see what's in the queue. Secondly,
if the gearman server dies (which seemed quite likely when I was
first getting to grips with this stuff and writing really buggy
code!) you lose your queue. Therefore I decided that I would
switch gearman over to running with persistent storage. My config
file (this is Ubuntu 10.10) is in
/etc/default/gearman-job-server and it contains the
following snippet:

I wrote recently about having gearman in my application, however I have
been seeing problems with the long-running PHP worker scripts. My
logs had entries like this:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away

The worker is a Zend Framework application, run from the CLI, and
it seemed like the Zend_Db_Adapter had no way of knowing when
MySQL had let go of its end of the connection. I tried a few
different things, including Zend_Db_Adapter::getConnection(), but
without success - until I dug through the source code (with some
help from a friend) and realised that ZF was not reconnecting at
all if it thought it already had a connection. So instead, I
expressly disconnected and reconnected the database handler. At
bootstrap time, I place my database handle into the registry, so
I simply added this at the start of the actual …

I use a MacBook Pro for my day-to-day operations here at CB1,
INC. I’m a huge believer that a development environment should
mimic the production environment, so I find myself running a
couple virtual machines in VMware Fusion.

The following guide is a reference for myself as well as possibly
a helpful resource for setting up your own Linux development
environment. Here’s an checklist of the tasks to perform and
software to install:

The past two weeks have been both exciting and extremely busy,
first traveling to Austin, TX for the first OpenStack Design
Summit, and then back home to Portland, OR for The O’Reilly Open
Source Conference (OSCON) and Community Leadership Summit. The events were great
in different ways, and there was some overlap with OpenStack
since we announced it on the first day of OSCON and
created quite a bit of buzz around the conference. I want to
comment on a few things that came up during these two weeks.

New Role

I’m now focusing on OpenStack related projects at Rackspace. I’m no
longer working …

OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten
around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley
Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making
the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free*
reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open
source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including
non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL
stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing
on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a
variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am
one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years,
Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main
organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main
organizer). The target audience …

Last week I was surprised to see this paper bubble back up on Planet
MySQL. It describes the pros and cons of thread and event
based programming for high concurrency applications (like a web
server), arguing that thread-based programming is superior if you
use an appropriate lightweight threading implementation. I don’t
entirely disagree with this, but the problem is such a library
does not exist that is standard, portable, and useful for all
types of applications. We have POSIX threads in the portable
Linux/Unix/BSD world, so we need to work with this. Other
experimental libraries based on lightweight threads or “fibers”
are really interesting as they can maintain your stack without
all the normal overhead, but it is hard to get the scheduling
correct for all …

I am back home from a good week at the 2010 O'Reilly MySQL
Conference & Expo. I had a great time and got to see some old
friends I had not seen in a while.

Oracle gave the opening keynote and it went pretty much like I
thought it would. Oracle said they will keep MySQL alive. They
talked about the new 5.5 release. It was pretty much the same
keynote Sun gave last year. Time will tell what Oracle does with
MySQL.

The expo hall was sparse. Really sparse. There were a fraction of
the booths compared to the past. I don't know why the vendors did
not come. Maybe because they don't want to compete with
Oracle/Sun? In the past you would see HP or Intel have a booth at
the conference. But, with Oracle/Sun owning MySQL, why even try.
Or maybe they are not allowed? I don't know. It was just
sad.

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